By Robert Whiting (2016)
Do you know your baseball history? If you do, then you will know there is an important anniversary coming up—an anniversary of a historically important event in the history of baseball in Japan, and an anniversary of a historic event in the history of Japan-America relations as well.
Don’t know? Well then, allow me to fill you in.
120 years ago, on May 23, 1896, the Japanese and Americans played their first formal game against each other. It was a match that helped turn baseball into the national sport of Japan, and a match that, at the same time, also gave the nation confidence it could succeed internationally in other matters.
Baseball had already been introduced to the Japanese people back in the early 1870s—two decades after Commodore Perry and his Black Ships had paid a visit to Japan to request the country open its doors after 250 years of feudal isolation. Visiting American professors, invited to Japan by the Emperor Meiji, taught their students how to play baseball, and the game initially took hold. It was played on a higher school and university level, and the Ministry of Education deemed it good for the development of the national character because it was Japan’s first team or group sport.
However, it wasn’t until that day in 1896, when a squad from the elite First Higher School of Tokyo, a prep school for the prestigious Imperial University, faced an amateur team of Americans from the Yokohama Country and Athletic Club in Yokohama in the first formal game between Japan and the US, that the game became a national phenomenon.
Originally, the Americans on the YCAC squad—traders, missionaries, diplomats who took their baseball seriously—had not wanted to play the Ichiko squad, as it was called. The Americans thought so little of their Japanese opponent that they worried their own conditioning would suffer by playing the Japanese students. But pressure was applied by the Foreign Ministry, and in the interests of international goodwill, the match was arranged. Reporters from Japan’s major newspapers were dispatched to cover the game.
As it turned out, the Ichiko squad was much better than the Americans had dreamed. The majority of the students had come from samurai families and had grafted the principles of the martial arts—endless training year-round, development of spirit—into their game. They practiced almost nonstop, rain or shine, intense heat or frigid cold. Team captain Jitsuzo Aoi swung the bat every night 1,000 times in the team dormitory. Ichiko pitchers threw several hundred pitches a day in practice; their pitching arms frequently became badly bent from throwing too many curveballs, and to straighten them out, they would hang from the branches of the cherry trees that bordered the field. Ichiko players were forbidden to use the word “ouch!”—no matter how much a ball stung their hands on a frozen winter’s day or how badly they bruised during sliding practice. Those who could not suppress the pain were allowed to use the word kayui (it itches). Many practiced Zen in the pursuit of purity and mental and moral discipline.
Backed by this fierce resolve, the Japanese won that first game by the astonishing score of 29-4. Their surprising triumph made newspaper headlines across the land. It electrified the nation and gave it a tremendous boost of confidence. As one Japanese historian has written, “Foreigners could not hope to understand the emotional impact of this victory, but it helped Japan, struggling toward modernization after centuries of isolation, overcome a tremendous inferiority complex it felt toward the more industrially advanced West. The idea was if we could defeat the Americans at their own game, then surely we could surpass them in other fields as well.” What made the victory even sweeter was that heretofore Japanese had not even been allowed inside the Yokohama club compound.
The Americans were naturally mortified. They had taken their foes lightly. They called for a rematch, practiced hard beforehand, but lost that one as well, by a score of 35-9. They strengthened their team with sailors from U.S. Navy ships anchored in Yokohama harbor, but then lost a third time, 22-6, this time at the Ichiko park, in front of several thousand spectators and a mob of reporters. The Ichiko team, it was quite apparent, was younger, faster, stronger, better trained, superior in every facet of the game.
Ichiko went on to beat the Yokohama team many more times. Pitcher Kotaro Moriyama later threw a shutout and became a hero of such proportions that he inspired a popular saying: “To be hit by Moriyama’s fastball is an honor exceeded only by being crushed under the wheel of the Imperial Carriage.”
In the wake of Ichiko’s stunning victories, schools all over Japan began forming baseball clubs. Ichiko players became national heroes, and upon graduating, they fanned out to educational institutions throughout the nation to teach students the finer points of this foreign game they had so obviously mastered. The Ichiko way became the model for all of baseball in Japan that followed for the next 120 years. If you ever wondered why baseball is played year-round in Japan and why practices are so intense—now you know.
Incidentally, the 120th anniversary of those first games will be commemorated at the Yokohama Country and Athletic Club on June 11 with a number of events, including a ceremonial game, a seminar and an evening reception.
I was saddened to hear of the passing, April 9 this year, of Tadahiro Ushigome, a longtime interpreter, scout and PR official for the Yokohama Bay Stars and before that the Taiyo Whales. I first got to know Ushigome-san in 1975 when I was researching The Chrysanthemum and the Bat. He was serving as the Taiyo Whales interpreter when I visited the team in training camp at Shizuoka, looking after the welfare of Clete Boyer and John Sipin. He also helped bring in such players as Felix Millan, Carlos Ponce, John Paciorek and Bobby Rose. He was full of interesting stories about the difficulties of being an interpreter. “The first time I ever heard the term ‘hit and run,’ I thought the gaijin was talking about an automobile accident.” He worked for the Yokohama team for more than 50 years. He was a good man. Rest in peace.
Tokyo Junkie 